'WorldWind' an unusual woodwind performance

The shakuhachi is a Japanese bamboo flute of ancient lineage. It, along with the Western flute and clarinet, are the featured instruments on a program that stretches the meaning of "eclectic" to the limit.

On Saturday, "WorldWind" will offer flutist Nora Suggs and her teaching and performing colleague clarinetist Deborah Andrus in a program combining the ancient shakuhachi and the modern flute and clarinet in myriad ways, from traditional Japanese to contemporary music.

Suggs says the shakuhachi is a hand-crafted bamboo tube of varying lengths (Suggs' is about 30 inches long), with only five finger holes: four in the front and one in back. It's blown on the end, but not like the whistle end of a recorder. The player blows on an edge, like a Western flute, which is also like blowing on a bottle.

The shakuhachi's musical aesthetic, however, is not at all like that of Western music.

"The instrument has a different, pentatonic scale, and the music played on it does not particularly focus on melody or harmony," Suggs says. Instead, rhythm and tone color are the primary means of expression.

Suggs said the method of blowing the shakuhachi offers considerable possibilities for varying tone. "It's a very difficult instrument," she says, "in large part because you have to do everything with only five finger holes."

Since Suggs has become a leading figure in Lehigh Valley classical music, particularly chamber music, this is an opportunity to describe her as well as her upcoming concert.

Suggs grew up in Houston, Texas. Her father was an accomplished amateur musician on clarinet for big band music, and oboe and English horn for the classical repertoire. Her mother she describes as "tone deaf."

After getting a bachelor's degree at Rice University in Houston, she went on to earn a medical degree at the Baylor University School of Medicine.

Students studying medicine or completing their residency don't have much time for sleep, let alone pursuing music, but Suggs says she managed to continue flute lessons as well as occasional freelance gigs.

Her surgery residency took her to Ohio for four years and then the Lehigh Valley, where she's been ever since.

After 22 years in the Valley as a successful surgeon, she closed her practice "on April 1, 2002" (a date she uttered with great delight) and became a full-time musician.

One of her major achievements as a musician has been the establishment of Satori, a repertory chamber music ensemble that has engaged nearly every professional musician in the Valley.

Suggs began this group in 1996, well before her retirement from medicine. She also began working with guitarist John Arnold in a duet called Two-Part Invention.

Suggs says this path was not part of her life's plan, but sort of developed until it took over — "confluence and opportunity" are her descriptive words. Today she and her fellow musicians perform widely; she also teaches flute at several local colleges.

And then there's shakuhachi. Suggs recalls visiting friends in Japan about 30 years ago, and having, by happenstance, one brief lesson on the instrument, only to think nothing more about the experience until about 14 years ago.

At that time she encountered a master teacher (shakuhachi players are ranked something like martial artists, but without the colored belts) in New York — James Schlefer, whose shakuhachi name is Nyo Raku.

Since that rekindling of interest in the instrument, and her study with Nyo Raku and in Japan, Suggs has reached the fourth level of playing. This entitles her to her own special name, Noh Raku, and the right to teach and perform on the instrument.

Shakuhachi playing has a long tradition in Japan playing solo and with other traditional Japanese instruments, but it has also adapted to the modern world, as listeners will discover from Saturday's program.

Suggs will play both Western flute and shakuhachi, while Andrus will perform on the clarinet, both B-flat and A, as well as bass clarinet. Some of the works will not include sakuhachi.

In addition to the traditional and modern shakuhachi pieces by Suggs, she and Andrus will join forces in a duet for flute and clarinet by Gary Schocker of Easton, titled "Airheads." They will also perform another duet, this time for the unlikely combination of flute and bass clarinet, by Cynthia Folio, a composer at Temple University.

Perhaps the prize for the most eccentric piece on the program is a solo work for clarinet by Phillip Bimstein, a self-described "alternative classical composer." He served two terms as mayor of Springdale, Utah, where he lives.

For the solo clarinet work, Bimstein took a recorder out into nighttime Utah and captured the sounds of crickets and other nocturnal fauna. He ran the resulting sounds through a computer, which created notation from these sounds. Bimstein then prepared this material for the clarinet.